Gina Arnold

Gina Arnold is an American author, music critic, and academic. A lecturer at Stanford University and an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco, she is the author of several books, including the 33⅓ book on Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville, which the New York Times described as "charming and brave and unexpectedly moving."^[1][2][3]

Between 1981 and 2003, Arnold contributed to publications including Spin, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice. Additionally, she wrote columns for the East Bay Express, Metro Silicon Valley and the San Jose Metro. Written in the first person, her work was frequently controversial. "In the ten years that Gina Arnold wrote for this paper, no one received more hate mail," the East Bay Express wrote in 2003.^[4]

Early life and education

Arnold grew up in Palo Alto, California. As a teenager, she attended the Sex Pistols' 1978 Winterland show in San Francisco—their final show in their original incarnation—and disagreed with a negative review which subsequently appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. Arnold wrote an angry letter to the editor in rebuttal. Her letter was published, and the Chronicle began to offer her assignments to cover music.^[5]

She was recruited for the swim team at UCLA, and attended the university for a year. She then transferred to University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a degree in communications.

In 2011, Arnold was awarded a Ph.D. in modern thought and literature at Stanford University. Her doctoral dissertation, "Rock Crowds and Power: Race, Space, and Representation," drew on historical archives, literature, and films about counter cultural rock festivals of the 1960s and 1970s in addition to her own experience covering rock festivals in the 1990s.^[5][6]

Career

Arnold began writing about music as a college student. At UCLA she wrote for the Daily Bruin and at Berkeley she wrote for The Daily Californian. Following her graduation, she was hired as a stringer by the Palo Alto Times Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News. She later covered music for the Los Angeles Times, as well as several other daily papers. Arnold wrote regularly on alternative music and indie rock for Spin and Entertainment Weekly.^[6][7]

Her weekly column "Fools Rush In" debuted in the East Bay Express in 1991 and ran through 2001. From 1996 through 2002, she wrote a column for the Metro Silicon Valley named after The Replacements album All Shook Down. With commentary that included the assertions that The Rolling Stones were “ugly, lecherous and old” and that the “the Replacements have influenced current music much more than the Stones have,” ^[8] Arnold's columns were often contentious."Arnold's writing usually contains three main items: fuzzy data, oversimplification, and half-assed reasoning," Dan Strachota wrote in the SF Weekly in 2000. "Her interest in music seemed to die around the time Kurt Cobain placed chrome to lip."^[9]

In 1993, her book Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana was published by Bloomsbury Press. ' She released Punk In The Present Tense, (published by St. Martin's Press) in 1997, and in 1999 held a journalism fellowship at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Although she continued to write about music for periodicals through the early 2000s, Arnold subsequently focused on her academic career.^[5]

Arnold's Exile in Guyville was published in 2014. It was described as "an engaging and enlightening example of criticism in the post-critical age" by The Rumpus. In The Believer, Greil Marcus wrote: "Arnold is a wonderful writer: fearless, precise, full of doubt, never taking anything for granted."^[10][11]

In popular culture

Aroma of Gina Arnold is the opening track of Trumans Water album Spasm Smash XXXOXOX Ox & Ass.^[12]

Personal life

Arnold is a competitive platform and springboard diver, and placed 7th in the Master's World Championships in 2014. She has one daughter.^[5]

Bibliography

• Exile In Guyville, Continuum/Bloomsbury Press, May 1, 2014
• Punk in the Present Tense, St. Martin's Press, June 1, 1997
• Route 666: On the Road To Nirvana, St. Martin's Press/Picador UK, September 1, 1993

Further reading

• a collection of Arnold's articles for Salon.com
• a collection Arnold's music reviews for Entertainment Weekly
• collection of Phoenix New Times articles
• Arnold's reviews for the Dallas Observer
• An excerpt from Kiss This

References